Thrifty Thursday: “Optional” Coverage & Microfiber Miracle

This Thursday tip is actually a double, since last week’s post was “donated” to the Romp. So first up is the last of my Bills & Budgets tips: “Optional” Car Insurance Coverage.

If you live in Colorado, back in November or December you might have received a letter from your insurance company regarding the new car insurance law requiring a minimum of $5000 in medical payments coverage (MPC). The way the law was written, this coverage was automatically added to all insurance policies on January 1, 2009 unless you signed and returned a rejection form to prevent this coverage from being added to your policy. What does it cover? Do you need it?

The MPC covers medical bills in case of an accident regardless of who is at fault. It’s relatively inexpensive (talk to your insurance agent), but you you might have the same coverage in your health insurance policy. This means you should weigh carefully whether to accept or reject this coverage. It takes some investigating if you don’t have your policy paperwork handy, but once you review your health insurance policy and what the MPC covers, you might find you don’t need the new MPC after all.

Keep in mind that this was added automatically to your policy unless you rejected it in writing (and why I put “optional” in quotation marks). If you didn’t do it before, you might want to check and see if you really need it or not. If you are adequately insured through your healthcare company (lol), you could save yourself some dough on your car insurance.

On the other hand, if you don’t have health insurance, this could be a relatively inexpensive way of insuring the health/safety of yourself and those in your car. It even covers pedestrians and bicyclists if they are hit by a car. A little food for thought, I guess.

Second for this Thrifty Thursday is the Microfiber Miracle! This is not the first TT tip I’ve written involving microfiber, but it is one of my favorite cleaning tools.

I swiffer with it. I have several microfiber cloths and a couple are just the right size to fit on my Swiffer. Our house has all hard surface flooring. Wood in the living/dining room and bedrooms, and tile in the kitchen and bath. I didn’t own a Swiffer for a long time because it seemed like a big waste to me. I mean, I loved the concept of picking up dust and hair on my hard floors (which is very important in a house with a 60 pound lab/velociraptor mix), but the cloths were so expensive!

Then one day I realized microfiber does an excellent job of collecting hair and dust. And I can wash it and reuse it!

A 16 count box of dry Swiffer cloths at CVS Pharmacy is $5.39. On Amazon.com, you can get three boxes of them (32 count each) for $22.49 plus $5.90 shipping. That’s 30-34 cents a cloth. All one time use. The wet cloths are $8.79 for 24 at CVS and $22.49 + 5.90 for shipping at Amazon for three 24 packs. That’s 37-39 cents for each one time use cloth.

And who knows how many cloths I’d need to cover all the floor space in my house??

The bright green cloths I use were a gift and came from The Pampered Chef. I don’t think they have this set anymore, but they sell a cranberry colored cloth for $8.50 plus tax and shipping. On Amazon, there is a set of two cloths that would fit perfectly on the head of a Swiffer for only $5.99 plus $5.14 for shipping, and they look pretty similar to the smaller of the two green cloths I have (even the same color!). Amazon says these cloths can be washed and reused up to 300 times each.

So that price break down is: $5.99+$5.14=$11.13, $11.13/600 (since there are two cloths)= $0.019 –LESS than two cents per use! AND, I shake my cloth out after I do one room and then put it back on and move to the next room. So one cloth can do my whole house (sometimes more than once) before I need to wash it. And if I want them wet, well, that’s easy to make happen with little to no cost. Plus, you can probably find similar cloths at a local store and save yourself the shipping, making it even more thrifty.

This doesn’t even take into account the fact that you are not throwing hundreds of one time use Swiffer cloths needlessly into the landfill. So, using microfiber instead, you are making a “green” choice when you clean your floors!

There are probably thousands of uses for the microfiber miracle. I just wanted to share my favorite! For the majority of March, I wanted to give a few Green Cleaning tips since I think we can all feel spring coming on!

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I have a client who injured himself with a chain sawm at his mother’s house. His medical insurance is refusing to pay, saying that his mother’s homeowner’s insurance should pay. Please beware of coverage issues with all insurance. Remember (and nota bene) they are in business to collect premiums, not to pay claims!

No kidding… you wouldn’t believe (well, you probably would) the rigamarole we’ve been through with our health insurance in the last two years. It’s a joke. It’s a shame that health care in America is for profit. It’s a basic human right, it should not be a business. But, that is a whole other Oprah…

Howdy!

From gardens, bees and backyard chickens in the heart of Denver to starting from scratch in San Antonio. Our family of five is striving to find the simple life - the easy way. I spend my free time blogging and getting dirt under my nails along side my hard-working husband. Yay for modern housewifery, urban livestock and front yard gardens!